This is the amazing tale of Christina Dodwell’s first adventure: a three-year journey through Africa. She was twenty-four when she and three companions crossed the Sahara by Landrover. But the two men of the party took the car and left her and her friend Lesley stranded in the middle of Nigeria. Recounted with modesty and good humour, it is a story of great tenacity and incredible courage. Christina travelled by horse, camel, on foot, hitching lifts from time to time—even hailing passing airplanes out of the sky! The author shared meals with cannibals, was treated by witch-doctors, learned to pan gold, and was imprisoned on a boat by a sexually perverse sea captain. She and her friend journeyed almost a thousand miles down the Congo River in a dugout canoe: the first women in the world to accomplish such a hazardous journey. This is a truly extraordinary travel book. It is a brilliant account of Africa, its sights and smells, its many races, seen through the eyes of an English girl. It is also the story of the education of innocence, a deeply honest self-portrait of Christina Dodwell’s reactions to herself in Africa—and how Africa changed her.